It’s yesterday once more

Nearly four years after the collapse of the World Trade Center, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will direct a film based on the story of two police officers who were trapped in the rubble on Sept. 11, 2001.

And in that rubble, the two stricken men will miraculously find ‘proof’ that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by a CIA-Halliburton-Zionist-BushHitler conspiracy. But the evidence will all mysteriously disappear after thay hand it in and some snarling unidentified suit with a Texan accent will warn them to “keep their big mouths shut”.

OK, rc, one may as well also admit that there will be a very pretty and shapely young woman who will take some convincing – as a proxy for the movie goer: “No! No! I don’t believe you!” (See?) “Not the president!”

“Mandy! [Shandy! Pandy! – short for Pandora, of course, what the hey] – you can’t deny the evidence of your own eyes!”

Mandy: “No! It’s not true! Our president would never order the killing of thousands of our own citizens! You’re crazy!” (She got that right.) “I’m leaving!” Runs to the elevator bank. Tom Cruise or whoever, “Wait! Please! Don’t go down there to that dark, empty parking area in sub-B3, where there’s always an echo of water dripping!”

Shandy-Pandy-Mandy gets in the elevator and stabs repeatedly at B3 while wiping away her tears and pushing her long hair out of her eyes. She has three hands. We see the floor numbers light up as she descends. Yup, 38 is still directly after 39. Gets out into a very dark basement parking lot – what happened to the lights? – and her high heels echo eerily as she searches, all alone for her car. Wait! Was that a threatening rustling sound from behind that pillar? She starts to run. They always start to run. High heels running make great dramatic impact. (Anyone see ‘Bowfinger’, by the way, when it’s a dog in high heels? This time it could be Tom Cruise’s Cuban heels making up the syncopated rhythm.)

I remember when I was twelve years old writing a story in which I was kidnapped by aliens but rescued by the police who broke into their spaceship as i was about to take off.
My english teacher told me it was the most pathetic rubbish he had ever read.
Maybe I should have gone into script writing?

Sadly, Stone used to have talent. JFK and Born on the 4th of July are extremely well made (photographed, edited, scored etc) exercises in propaganda and manipulation. Too bad Stone is such a despicable character. I have a feeling that if he found himself living in a totalitarian society – real, not imagined – he would get along just fine.

Alisa – How interesting that it’s another woman who finds Cage very unattractive.

What is offensive is the grating, paint-by-numbers predictability of these movies. You could write them yourself. They’re constructed according to a recipe and provide “evidence” for ignorant, biased people to reinforce their prejudices. They will go and see this movie and come out saying, “See?” It will be full of holes and wild, impossible assumptions, but it will emerge as the new bible of jerks who believe a) no Jews went in to work at the WTC on that awful day and b) it was in relatiation – two years in advance – for us liberating Iraq.

I have enjoyed most Oliver Stone films I have seen. I’m afraid the exception in Nixon, but I probably need to see it again – JFK was good, thoughit becomes plainly obvious at the end that old whatsisface trying to prove the conspiracy doesn’t prove a dman thing about anybody except that how Kennedy was killed is a bit more suspiscious than people would have us believe, and that there was a conspiracy. Who the conspiracy involves is not proven in court to any standard of evidence.

Born of the Fourth of July is brilliant, and I think it was the first fil I actually saw Tom Cruise act in (as opposed to the awful Top Gun, Roads of Thunder, Cocktail performances).

Oliver Stone is not a brilliant film-maker. He’s a formula hack and his formula is “American Bad! and anybody who fights her has a good and valid point”. He’s made a fine buck off of that formula, so there’s no reason to believe he’ll abandon it now. He’s simply a better-financed version of Michael Moore. The best proof I can offer for that conclusion is that whenever he leaves his comfortable little paradigm, he get’s whacked at the box office (see mention of “Alexander” above). Other, truly brilliant, filmmakers (John Houston) have managed to cross that bridge unscathed.
The fear that he’ll use 9/11 as another vehicle for his “message” is real and there’s nothing in his filmography to dispel that fear. Having said all that, Rodger Simon provides at least one good reason why that won’t be the case. I still think Stone won’t resist the temptation to screw this totally up. I guess we’ll all find out when the reviews show up. My bet is that the New York Times and the Guardian will love it. Nuff said.

Your assessment of the likely shape of Stone’s film is inaccurate if Stuart Jeffries is right.

Hasn’t the heroism of New York’s police officers and firefighters been trumpeted sufficiently from newspapers, TVs and T-shirts? Do we need the first feature film to tackle 9/11 to do so through US flag-waving masquerading as a globally relevant human drama? It is not to disrespect the dead nor living heroes to suggest that we don’t. It seems likely that it will further solidify the myth of the stoicism of New Yorkers (a myth as questionable as that now being touted about Londoners) in a way that stops us thinking imaginatively about what happened in New York then, and why.

When Hollywood does history it not only often gets it wrong (think of U-571, which suggested Americans rather than the Royal Navy captured the Enigma decoding machine), but makes us more stupid. And why always heroism? Why not memorialise cowardice? If we are to learn from history, we need to recount it warts and all. Hollywood doesn’t do warts.

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